h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's the best way to appraoch local companies to contribute prizes for a raffle we're running? Our singing group want to run a themed "chocolate raffle", and figure that the big chocolate shop in the city centre would be good for some of the prizes. What do they get out of it, pubicity? a warm glowing feeling?

I'd definitely offer them publicity, and I think it would help to have a clear picture of what kind of publicity - a sign maybe saying 'donated by'? And present the idea to them.

Oh - and if you post your question over at <./>Askh2g2</.> I think you'd get more replies

Thanks Titania &. We figured that a sign and maybe a note on the raffle tickets along the lines of "Prizes donated by...". The thing it, how do you approach the stores, letters to the branch manager, speak to the senior duty person? I don't know and would love some advice on this.

I was coming to the conclusion that Ask would be the place to re-post, considering the delay in responses to it, and how great people usually are here. I'll post it there and see what comes up.

This isn't quite the same but this is from personal experiance oo quite a few years ago now (must have been about 15 years ago).

We were doing a sponsored Hike for charity.
We'd got offical paperwork from the charity concerned, which we would brandish like a large comando knife at our victums... I mean sponsors.
We' got quite a bit of sponsorship moneys already and then hit the point of us not having the equipment we needed for the two weeks of hiking.
So we approached a number of local camping/outdoor persuit firms, to get sponshorship in the form of the loan of things like tents, tthe supprizingly large number of maps we needed and some other assorted things...
Our main eeffort of bridary was that we'd already arrnaged coverage in the two main local newspapers and also on the local Anglia news (radio and TV).... So even though some of these people were really small independant little stores we quickly got somethign near £1K of gear on loan which allowed us to do the walk/hike;A couple also then donated actual sponsor money, and we got them all mentioned in the local newspapers, though I don't think they were mentioned by name* on the TV or radio....
Not too bad now i think about it for a couple of 16 year old thugs who wanted to do some hiking in the summer hols but couldn't have afforeed it without doing it this way, and who ended up raising over £5K for the charity to boot
Mind, with the credit crunch and all that nonsense at the moment I don't know how obliging soem of the smaller retail/independant stores may be feeling at the moment

Thanks 2legs. Like Titania suggested, I'm going to post this to Ask, and see what other stuff researchers can come up with. See you there.